Research Professor Alessandra Buonanno will receive the 2023 Oskar Klein Medal by the Stockholm University and the Nobel Committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Each year, a distinguished physicist is invited to deliver the Memorial Lecture and to receive the Oskar Klein medal. Buonanno will give the Memorial Lecture on “Gravitational-Wave Astronomy: Theoretical Advances and Challenges” on November 23 at the AlbaNova Center in Stockholm.Alessandra Buonanno © Markus Scholz for the Leopoldina

Buonanno is the director of the Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity Department at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics  (Albert Einstein Institute) in Potsdam.

Buonanno's research has spanned several topics in gravitational wave theory, data analysis and cosmology. She is a Principal Investigator of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, and her waveform modeling of cosmological events has been crucial in the experiment’s many successes. Her work has merited election to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and Leopoldina, the German National Academy of Sciences.

In 2018, Buonanno received the Leibniz Prize, Germany's prestigious research award. Other accolades include the Galileo Galilei Medal of the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), the Tomalla Prize, the Dirac Medal (with Thibault Damour, Frans Pretorius, and Saul Teukolsky) and the Balzan Prize (with Damour).

She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the International Society of General Relativity and Gravitation and a recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship and the Richard A. Ferrell Distinguished Faculty Fellowship.

Buonanno, Charlie Misner, Peter Shawhan and others detailed UMD's contributions to gravitational studies in a 2016 forum, A Celebration of Gravitational Waves. 

Originally published by the Max Plank Institute: https://www.aei.mpg.de/1092354/alessandra-buonanno-awarded-oskar-klein-medal

Sarah Eno has been elected to the leadership track of the American Physical Society Division of Particles and Fields (APS DPF). She will serve as vice-chair from 2024-26, followed by two years as division chair.Eno has worked on several collider experiments. In 1993, she joined UMD as an Assistant Professor, and began research at the DØ experiment at Fermilab.  The discovery of the top quark—announced by the CDF and DØ teams in 1995—was a milestone in particle physics. Eno’s precise measurement of the decay width and mass of the electroweak W boson helped predict the mass of the top quark. 

Sarah Eno

Since 1999, Eno has worked on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. In 2012, CERN announced experimental verification of the Higgs boson, and the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs, whose 1960s calculations determined that mass could not exist without the presence of such a particle.  Since 2020 she has participated in the development of experiments for a potential new electron-positron collider at CERN (FCC-ee). She is also exploring improvement and simulations of calorimeters to better study the momentums of jets and of missing transverse energy, and studies of radiation damage in plastic scintillators.

Eno is a University of Maryland Distinguished ScholarTeacher and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society (APS).

Professor Howard Milchberg has been awarded the 2024 Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in Laser Science, presented by the American Physical Society (APS), for “pioneering contributions in the fields of plasma optics, guiding the ultra-intense laser beams, and developing compact, high-gradient laser-driven accelerators”. Howard Milchberg

Over the past year, Milchberg has had numerous research successes.  Recent results have included:

• Record all-optical laser-based acceleration of electrons to 5 billion electron volts, published in the September 2022 issue of Physical Review X.
• Demonstration of a continuously operating optical fiber made of thin air by creating an optical guiding method using auxiliary ultrashort laser pulses to sculpt fiber optic waveguides in the air itself.  This allows high-power laser beams to be guided without using common optical fibers made of strands of glass that can be damaged by high power beams.  This experiment was published in the April 2023 issue of Optica.
• Setting a record with a nearly 50-meter long air waveguide in an effort to use pulsed air waveguiding to temporarily transfigure thin air into a fiber optic cable, published in the Jan.  2023 issue of Physical Review X.
• Recognition for his Lab for Intense Laser-Matter Interactions by being chosen as one of ten LaserNetUS  nodes, providing funding for collaboration with US and international researchers

The APS Honors Program recognizes outstanding achievements in research, education, and public service.  The Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in Laser Science “recognizes contributions to basic research using lasers to advance our knowledge of the fundamental physical properties of materials and their interactions with light.”  Previous winners include College Park Professors Chris Monroe and Bill Phillips. 

Original story: https://ece.umd.edu/news/story/professor-milchberg-to-receive-aps-award

Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been named the recipient of the Richard E. Prange Prize and Lectureship in Condensed Matter Theory and Related Areas for 2023. He will give his lecture, "The Magic of Moiré Quantum Matter," on Tues., Oct. 24 at 4 p.m. in room 1410 of the John S. Toll Physics Building. Refreshments will be served at 3:30 p.m. 

The Prange Prize, established by the UMD Department of Physics and Condensed Matter Theory Center (CMTC), honors the late Professor Richard E. Prange, whose distinguished professorial career at Maryland spanned four decades (1961-2000). The Prange Prize is made possible by a gift from Dr. Prange's wife, Dr. Madeleine Joullié, a professor of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania.Pablo Jarillo-Herrero (courtesy of MIT)

Richard E. PrangeDr. Prange was a member of the Maryland condensed matter theory group for more than 40 years and was an affiliate of CMTC with its inception in 2002. He edited a highly-respected book on the quantum Hall effect and made important theoretical contributions to the subject. His interests extended into all aspects of theoretical physics, and continued after his retirement, recalled Sankar Das Sarma, who holds the Richard E. Prange Chair in Physics at UMD and is also a Distinguished University Professor and director of the CMTC.

While earning his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago under Nobelist Yoichiro Nambu, Prange also worked with Murray Gell-Mann and Marvin Goldberger. 

Jarillo-Herrero joined MIT in 2008, and has received an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship, a DOE Early Career Award, a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, an ONR Young Investigator Award, a Moore Foundation Experimental Physics in Quantum Systems Investigator Award, the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Physics Prize and the 2020 Wolf Prize in Physics. His work showing that slight rotations of adjacent layers of graphene allowed control of its electronic properties was named the Physics World 2018 Breakthrough of the Year. 

Jarillo-Herrero joins a prestigious list of Prange Prize recipients: Philip W. Anderson, Walter Kohn, Daniel Tsui, Andre Geim, David Gross, Klaus von Klitzing, Frank Wilczek, Juan Maldacena and Charles Kane.

In addition to the Tuesday lecture, Jarillo-Herrero will deliver the CMTC JLDS Seminar on Wednesday, October 25 at 10 a.m. in room 4402 of the Atlantic Building. 

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Distinguished University Professor Thomas M. Antonsen will receive the American Physical Society’s (APS) 2023 James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics for “pioneering contributions in the theory of magnetized plasma stability, RF, current drive, laser-plasma interactions, and charged particle beam dynamics”.  He will be honored at the 65^th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics in October.Thomas Antonsen

The James Clerk Maxwell Prize annually recognizes outstanding contributions to the field of plasma physics.  The prize is named after a nineteenth century Scottish physicist known for his work with electricity, magnetism and light.

Antonsen joined the department, then known as the Department of Electrical Engineering and Physics, in 1984.  He is highly recognized in his esearch fields of plasma theory, nonlinear dynamics and chaos, and currently holds appointments in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), the Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics (IREAP), Physics, and the Maryland Energy Innovation Institute.

In 2017, he was appointed University of Maryland Distinguished University Professor, the highest recognition for faculty members.  Other awards include the Clark School of Engineering Outstanding Research Award, the IEEE Plasma Science and Applications Award, the John R. Pierce Award for Excellence in Vacuum Electronics, and the IEEE Marie Sklodowska-Curie Award for contributions to plasma science. He is a fellow of IEEE and APS.

Antonsen will receive $10,000 and recognition at the 65th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics this fall in Denver, Colorado. 

Previous UMD physicists who have won the Maxwell Prize include Hans R. Griem, Roald Sagdeev, James Drake, Phillip A. Sprangle and Ronald C. Davidson.